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Review
This game was entered in the Text Adventure literacy jam. It includes a brief tutorial where you take a nap, encounter a violent earthquake and are led to another world lying underneath yours!
The gameplay revolves around exploring the fantasy world, picking up items, often magical, and using them, frequently through the use of riddles.
The game makes heavy use of AI art to provide location images. It provides vivid and detailed images, but due to lack of consistent themes it made it difficult to really imagine the way things were.
I found the gameplay both polished and unpolished. On the one hand, several puzzles were well-clued and suggested the commands to be used. On the other hand, some simple things were difficult to do (to go to sleep, I couldn't SLEEP or ENTER BED but had to LIE DOWN ON BED, for instance). A frequent issue I encountered was that the solution to one problem was often very far away from the problem itself, which meant that a lot of the game involved just grabbing everything and hoping it would eventually be useful. You may say, 'but all games are like that! Zork! Adventureland!' and that is true, so if you liked the gameplay in those games you may like this style. I played about 1/3 on my own and used a walkthrough for the rest.
Somehow the story and setting felt like it was consistent in each scene but not consistent altogether. There is an overarching story with recurring characters, but outside of that a lot is random. The world is accessed through a ravine in your world, so it's like a 'portal' story. But then you go through another portal, so it's like an isekai within an isekai, but the second portal journy isn't really remarked on. You go from unused stairways to a city and from descending a dungeon area to being outdoors. Things like a pirate are included, but why? Plot points are repeated, like your cat running off and you rescuing her. Nevertheless, each component was fun.
Overall, it was interesting, and felt a lot like a playthrough of AI dungeon, except it's a single story, not a collection of them. So the best part of the game for me was the sense that everything would be new and unexpected in each new area, but I missed a sense of cohesiveness and purpose.
